"Our correspondent Mr. Harry Westbury is some lad. You will find his letter at the foot of the next column to this. Why, asks Harry, in these days when you may consider yourself lucky to have a roof over your head at all, should your head and that roof be brought into sudden and violent contact? Not that Harry is a jumper; he isn't going to challenge Joe Darby; but the ceiling and your occiput can establish connection just the same if the former comes down on the latter. What he really means is that aeroplanes, subject to sudden syncopes of the engines, have no business over Chelsea's pleasant roofs at all.
"H.W. does not claim that he personally suffered damage from the crash we reported last Friday. But he is a respected House and Estate Agent residing in the district and speaks feelingly. _C'est son métier_, as our gallant and Gallic Allies say. He means, we take it, that if civil aviation is to develop, corresponding safeguards must be developed side by side with it. Here we are with Harry all the way. Our Olympians may have burst a number of brain-cells over the present Regulations, but they will have to find a new wave-length. Tom, Dick and Harry we know, but we have not yet been properly introduced to Tom, Dick and Icarus. No, sir, not with building materials at their present price and the plumber rolling up in his Rolls-Ford. The pilot who came down in Chelsea last Thursday is said to have been employed by the Aiglon Company. Nuff said. If the Aiglon or any other Company is out for public support it knows what to do. In the meantime we hope Mr. Westbury won't raise his house premiums. But that is another story.
That was the whole text of it. Was it fair comment on a matter of public interest? Well, I don't say it wasn't. Was it a timely reminder that high-spirited lads who had lately been praised for their dare-devilry must now pull themselves together and fall into line with the new conditions? Very likely. Was it a legitimate attempt to arouse interest in the age's new wonder, or merely a political stick with which covertly to beat some high official dog or other? I didn't know.
For my mind was occupied with quite other thoughts. From round the edge of my paper I was trying to sum up Westbury--a young man, but unexercised; seldom drunk, as a man in decent physical condition would have been on half that he swallowed, but already habituated and inured; probably quite well-to-do, in that mysterious way that causes tradesmen quietly to acquire their own houses and to drive in their own two-seaters to places of entertainment such as that I was in; and yet in a sense a minor man of affairs as distinct from a tradesman, a cut above the shirt-sleeves-and-counter business, if not exactly entitled to style his occupation a profession. He had got over the first overweening stage of the vanity of that day's publicity; he was now a little disparaging what he wouldn't have allowed anybody else to disparage; was treating Hodgson quite as a familiar, in fact, which as far as I was concerned he was perfectly at liberty to do. A dangerous beast, I thought again, and none the less dangerous now that Billy Mackwith, as foreman of that coroner's jury, had got his back thoroughly up.